Learn

I’m serious. Smart people with good ideas worth sharing can get a lot out of this exercise.

It’s technically easy and when it works, your idea will spread far and wide. Even better, the act of writing your idea in a cogent, organized way will make the idea better. You can write an ebook about your travel destination, your consulting philosophy or an amazing job you’d like to fill.

Seven (wait, now it’s 12) years ago, I wrote a book called Unleashing the Ideavirus. It’s about how ideas spread. In the book, I go on and on about how free ideas spread faster than expensive ones. That’s why radio is so important in making music sell.

Anyway, I brought it to my publisher and said, “I’d like you to publish this, but I want to give it away on the net.” They passed. They used to think I was crazy, but now they were sure of it. So I decided to just give it away. The first few days, the book was downloaded 3,000 times (note: forgive the layout. It’s not what I would do if I was doing it today). The next day, the number went up. And then up. Soon it was 100,000 and then a million. The best part of all is that I intentionally made the file small enough to email. Even without counting the folks who emailed it hundreds of times to co-workers, it’s easily on more than 2,000,000 computers. I didn’t ask anything in return. No centralized email tool. Here it is. Share it.

A Google search finds more than 200,000 matches for the word ‘ideavirus’, which I made up. Some will ask, “how much money did you make?” And I think a better question is, “how much did it cost you?” How much did it cost you to write the most popular ebook ever and to reach those millions of people and to do a promotion that drove an expensive hardcover to #5 on Amazon and #4 in Japan and led to translation deals in dozens of countries and plenty of speaking gigs?

It cost nothing.

Changethis, which I dreamed up in a moment of weakness a few years ago, is still going strong under better management now. It’s the epicenter of ebook distribution, but there are plenty of places just dying to host your content. And your blog is the best place to launch your idea. The biggest challenge is that there are no barriers. If you want to do it, go do it. Ideas worth spreading, spread.